Talk:Icehouse Baseball

organize your game rules so they are easier to refer to. - AK

2009 Game Award evaluation

As AK mentioned, it was hard to read the rules as they were originally posted. I made subheaders for the different topics of the rules, sorted the individual sentences into those subheaders, and used the wiki syntax for bulleting -- it makes a big difference.

The cards files have varying sizes for the borders around each card (a common error, it seems). They are also rather small, making them hard to shuffle. It would be better to have the tables fill the page by either making them 4x6 instead of 6x4, or turning the pages sideways (landscape mode), and making the tables bigger.

Baseball is fun, and making a baseball simulation game is an attractive project. I appreciate the thought the designer put into this; it feels like he ran out of time, though, since the decks for 2nd and 3rd base are identical except for the names of the base. At any rate, I will treat Icehouse Baseball from a few different angles.

As a baseball simulation, this game could use some improvement:

Giving equal probabilities to singles, doubles, triples and home runs doesn't feel right. I'd advise using 2 or 3 dice, which gives a broader range of both results of the roll and probabilities for the results.
Having all 4's result in an automatic home run really doesn't feel right. There should be a deck of cards for the Home Run result, just as for the other 3.
There should be some Double Play cards in the decks, and perhaps some other results, such as "Safe, but the most advanced runner ahead of you is tagged out".
There should also be Balls as results of the die rolls.

As a game, this entry does not allow for any decision-making, which means it would get boring for most adults pretty quickly. It could be fun for younger children, though, and also be a means of explaining how baseball works.

As a pyramid game, it doesn't take advantage of the attributes of pyramids, but just uses them as markers. It's not necessary for the game to take advantage of the pyramids' attributes in general, but for the award it usually is.

My assessment for the award: this doesn't make the cut.

- BStout